Doing Washington Right

Enter Memaloose. These guys get Washington right – quirky yet delicious wines that merge new world and warmer climate fruit with freshness and great respect for old world traditions and flavours. Memaloose is not concerned with maximum extraction and extreme fruitiness. At the same time, they clearly do not shy away from the greater ripeness of the grapes in Washington compared to France (their inspiration).

Owner Rob McCormick has a history as an executive and consultant in the food industry. Winemaker Brian McCormick trained in Enology at UC Davis and spent time at Zind Humbrecht and in the Dry Creek Valley. However, this is clearly no stereotypical UC Davis project – rather, these guys are serious about making lighter styled wines that pair very well with food. Their achievement with this wine is all the more impressive considering that they only produced their first vintage in 2006.

Gorge Terroir

Columbia Gorge is situated just on the Washington and Oregon border. Extreme weather variations, including very high winds, make this a challenging but unique place to grow grapes. It is challenging insofar as one has to carefully match the right microclimate to the right grape – but unique insofar as almost anything can find a place in one of the many diverse climatic sub-zones. The Idiot’s Grace vineyard, where the grapes for this wine are grown, is at 300 feet elevation and sits on clay/loam soils.

Loire Meets Washington

Cool climate varietally expressive Cabernet Franc. Like Bernard Baudry meets Washington fruit lushness and all at 13% ABV. The wine is beautifully expressive both aromatically and on the long palate. There is almost nothing like this wine being made anywhere in the New World – in fact, it speaks of varietal and place so well that I think it is a new world benchmark for immediately delicious, perfumed, seductive Cabernet Franc – you know, the kind of Cabernet Franc that great producers in the Loire have been making unnoticed for generations. However, here you have a wine that is even more accessible and even more guzzle-inducing given the sheer lushness of the fruit and textures.

I have to place this as one of the most delicious wines I’ve had in months. It is too bad the production is limited to a mere 165 cases.

Excellent and Highly Recommended Value
$25 at Soul Wine Seattle

Unlike other great grapes, such as Pinot Noir or Syrah, it is not difficult to isolate Sangiovese’s distinctive voice. Great Sangiovese is always bitter-sweet, always hovering between fruit and savor. But it is structured and robust, with a powerful constitution for oak (much unlike Pinot or Syrah). It is too easy to call Sangiovese Italy’s Cabernet Sauvignon, because great Sangiovese does not travel well. Only Italian vineyards make Sangiovese taste good, and only in recent decades have producers started to truly tap into its potential.

Over this spotlight I have learned that the basic contrast between traditional and modern Sangiovese misses the point. Great Sangiovese simply cannot be overripe or over-manipulated. This is a grape that can stand up to a lot, but in order to be amazing, it must be allowed to sit perfectly poised between over the top and restrained. It must be vinified cleanly, but it cannot be forced into internationalism (When’s the last time you’ve seen an Italian be anything other than Italian?). You may not love Sangiovese, but it is impossible to hate.

Great Sangiovese can also be found at all price points. This cannot be said for some of the world’s, or even Italy’s, other great grapes. Clearly the best wines are being made in Tuscany, but Umbria and Sardegna also represent.

Carmignano the Small and Mighty

This superb wine is from the tiny 300 hectare Carmignano DOCG west of Florence. A Florentine region to the core, this was one of the four original production zones created by the Medici family in 1716. Because these vineyards are fairly northerly, most of the wines from Carmignano are blended in order to soften some of the hard edges of cooler-climate Sangiovese. The DOCG rules only require 50% Sangiovese, allowing many other grapes into the blend.

Piaggia started making a Carmignano Riserva in 1991 and has since vastly improved quality, using guyot trained vines planted in clay soils. The wine sees 18-28 days maceration, is fermented and aged in French Barriques for 18 months, and is unfined and unfiltered. Made from 70% Sangiovese, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc and 10% Merlot.

The Wine

The nose offers darker fruits of plum and black cherry along with some chocolate and spices from the oak, but also the classic bitter cherry of Sangiovese. This is a rich wine on the palate, but I think it maintains a good amount of traditional styling. The bitter cherry, herbs, and leather make this unmistakably Sangiovese driven. Without knowing if it was oaked, I figured that it probably was but that the oak had integrated very well (turns out I was right). This wine also has surprising clarity and balance for a 2003 and is, ultimately, quite an exceptional wine.

And that concludes the Spotlight on Sangiovese. Next up? Nebbiolo.

Excellent.
~$80 at Kits Wine Cellar

Baudry makes several cuvees, with this particular wine being made from 10-20 year old vines. The grapes are grown on southeast facing limestone hills and are hand harvested. The juice is then fermented in wooden vats and matured in 12 months in old oak casks – though the oak merely provides backbone rather than flavour.

The wine itself is wonderfully balanced and easy to drink but also complex and long. Flavours like blackberry, red cherry, fresh underbrush, graphite, and some mineral and earth give great depth of flavour to this understated dry wine. The lack of dominant wood characteristics, low alcohol, and incredible fresh acidity allows the wine to be both supple and versatile. This wine is so versatile, in fact, that it fulfilled my mission to find a red wine that would pair with Tandoori chicken. This is a wine where simple pleasure becomes a memorable experience. I have no doubt this could lay down for a few years, but when it tastes this good right now, why would you? 12.5% ABV.

Excellent
$40 at Kitsilano Wine Cellars

This is a huge shame to me because it doesn’t allow the BC wineries that are putting all their efforts into making quality wines that speak of place to shine through. These are the wineries we should be highlighting and juxtaposing to those wineries that haven’t got it quite right, particularly in the spirit of the 2010 Olympics where we are trying to highlight the BEST of Canada.

In the end, after many tastings, I think BC has the potential to become a wine region that produces consistently excellent quality wines. So, when I taste wines from BC I’m looking for wines that are courageous and that are taking the risks necessary to show unique ‘BC’ qualities. Given that we are such a new wine region, it takes a lot of courage and risk to try to put oneself out there and make wine in a BC style that does not mimic the likes of California and Australia.

From the perspective of new wineries, it is understandable that they wish to put a product out there that will sell, and so it is easy to emulate styles that are already proven successful in this market (i.e. US and Australian wines). The perfect analogy arises when we think back to high school days: when someone is insecure they try to copy something that is popular – but the best things about people arise when they are showing their own unique qualities and what is naturally good about who they are. BC is in just this dilemma. We are the “tweens” of the wine-world and we haven’t quite found our sense of self yet. When the likes of giant wine corporations like Vincor are dominating Olympic venues, it is time to start getting the word out on the best small producers in the province and not ’underwriting’ poorly made wines with ambiguous or meaningless reviews - it is the wineries taking risks and achieving results that deserve the praise and the pay-off. It is a wine writer’s duty to seek out and find these types of wineries and give them exposure and help them tell their story.

I’m going to be harsh in these reviews, but only because I want to highlight the quest for a sense of ’BCness’ in our wines and to promote what BC has to offer that is unique from every other region. Given some of the wines I tasted at Taste BC this year, I know that some of the wineries I will be profiling are going to pull through and show that they are taking the first steps towards adulthood.

The first winery I’m writing about is Hester Creek. I found writing this article very difficult because, to be honest, I did not enjoy the wines. But, I do appreciate how hard it is to get things right in the Okanagan and how wineries feel they need to cater to what they perceive to be mass-palate appeal. Hester Creek winery is situated in the Golden Mile area of the Okanagan. Here we go…

Hester Creek Pinot Gris 2008

With a nose of pear, nectarine, and peach, this was big and rich and finished off with hints of citrus, vanilla and honey. The palate brought more nectarine and peach – this is quite a big and full wine, but it is also overly rich and alcoholic. This is essentially a mimic of a basic Alsatian off-dry style. It’s actually not bad – I was honestly expecting less of the wine. However, it is hard to get a lot of the subtler fruit characteristics and aromatic complexity one comes to expect from well made Pinot Gris. The finish is also off-balance and somewhat sticky and hot. This wine would work better if it took more chances, reduced the residual sugar, and went for a fully dry and refreshing style. Also, as the wine warms up to serving temperature from fridge temperature it essentially loses its tightness and becomes a bit of a mess with flavours splashing all over the place.

In the end, this is somewhat of an innocuous wine that is ultimately inoffensive but also pretty boring. At this price point you can definitely get some decent whites, but this wine will certainly be better than most other Pinot Gris at this price point, except for carefully selected wines. But keep in mind that if selected carefully, you can get a far superior white to this for the same price. 13.8% ABV.

Fair

$17

Hester Creek Semillon Chardonnay (unoaked) 2008

The nose doesn’t give up a lot – maybe some sweet citrus (lemon and orange), licorice and a hint of minerality. The palate brings some mineral and is a bit tighter and firmer than the Pinot Gris, which is nice. There is actually a mineral component here behind the subtle citrus notes. I like that the wine is subtler and less punchy than the Pinot Gris since this gives it the ability to compliment food much more readily. I also enjoy the herbal and spice kick that the Semillon adds to the blend and I do think this wine is doing more than a lot of whites at this price point.

That said, the wine has unbalanced alcohol and, again, it isn’t as clean and crisp as it should be. It also does not quite have a sense of place nor is it a QPR mega-find. While many people would find this to be fine, to me it is exactly what I tend to associate with BC white wines that hope to achieve mass appeal: no sense of place, off balance alcohol, and not as crisp as it should be. However, you have to be fair here and you have to compare this wine to others in the same price category. 13.8% ABV.

Good

$16

Hester Creek Reserve Merlot 2005

This is very green on the nose, and is almost rubbery, with butterscotch and oak trying to hide the green bell pepper aromas that are a sign of ineffectively ripened fruit. The butterscotch and oak (mostly American) dominates the fruit on the palate, which also brings out plenty of vanilla and dill. There’s really no actual fruit showing through in this wine. I feel harsh here, but I can’t go anywhere good with this wine, especially at this price. I even tried to drink this with a burger (the easiest meat to pair with a big rich red) and they didn’t even go together because the oak flavours were so over the top.

No Good

$26

Hester Creek Cabernet Franc 2005

The nose on this is grapey, plumy and has cocoa dust, but ultimately is not giving up a lot right now. The palate is brighter and cleaner than the merlot, and while there is still way too much oak here, it is more retrained. This allows some of the herbaceous quality of the Cab Franc grape to come through, which is a good thing. My big concern with this wine, though, is its price. It is not delivering what it should at this price point at all. There are so many examples both of international wine and local BC wine that knock this out of the water. Many of the wineries I will be profiling in the next couple of weeks are perfect examples of how BC can over deliver for these price points. This wine is not one of them.

Fair to Good

$26

Overall this was an extremely disappointing look at BC wine, and it is unfortunate that this is how the series began. However, I see this as a good point of juxtaposition for the wineries to come. BC does make excellent wine – but it is wines like the ones I just reviewed that give many the impression that we don’t really know what we’re doing here. While we do have plenty to learn, steps are being taken to push the envelope and challenge the quality threshold, and, as I discovered at the recent Taste BC tasting, there are BC wineries that are absolutely going down the right track (see, for example, my recent article on Le Vieux Pin’s “Belle” Pinot Noir). I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you.

*Full disclosure, I received these wines as samples.